A week after the firing of Jill Abramson as executive editor ofThe New York Times*, the newspaper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., sat down withV.F.’s Sarah Ellison for an exclusive interview about the controversy. He had much to say about the coverage thus far (some of which he characterized as “lies”)—and revealed second thoughts about his own decision-making.*

Like others who follow the goings-on of the media world, I’ve been both shocked and transfixed by events at The New York Times—the abrupt firing of its executive editor, Jill Abramson, by its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and the controversy that has followed in its wake.

On the afternoon of May 18, I met with Sulzberger in his office on the executive 16th floor of the Times’s headquarters on Eighth Avenue, in Manhattan. I had requested an interview, and he had responded by offering to meet me on a Sunday afternoon. He had issued statements about the Abramson matter, but until now had not given an interview to any journalist with the intention of putting his remarks on the record. He wore a button-down Oxford-blue polo shirt and sat facing the framed quotation from Winston Churchill that is displayed on a side table: “Never never never give up.” As has sometimes been pointed out, the quotation is not quite accurate. The full rendering is this: “Never give in, never, never, never—never, in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

The short, chosen version of the quotation certainly captures Sulzberger’s earnestness, but at that moment, given how many key people he has given up on during his 22-year tenure, the message felt ironic. Sulzberger is not only the publisher of The New York Times newspaper, but as the head of the family that owns the controlling stake in its parent company the chairman of the company’s board. It had been four days since Sulzberger had announced the firing of Abramson, whom he had appointed as executive editor in 2011. She was only the latest in a series of executives whom Arthur had handpicked and then subsequently felt compelled to let go. In 2011, he abruptly terminated the company’s first female president and C.E.O., Janet Robinson, whom he had put into place in 2004. In 2003, he terminated then-executive editor Howell Raines, whom he had anointed in 2001. I asked Sulzberger what those three high-profile reversals signified. He appeared unfazed by the question. Even at 62, as his hair grays and recedes, he remains somehow childlike. Boyish is the term most often used to describe him. “The question is, am I doing a bad job of picking leaders for The New York Times? I don’t think so,” he said. “Everyone who pretends they have a 100 percent success rate isn’t trying hard enough.” Fair enough, though it makes you wonder how low the percentage must go before one should begin to take stock.

Sulzberger agreed to talk—or so I surmised—because he had lost the first round of spin coming out of the Abramson episode. “I really would love to make sure, hearing from me, face to face,” he said, gesturing between us, “that you know a lot of what’s out there is untrue.” Later, he added, “I’m not going to let lies like this lie.”

First up, he tackled that morning’s appearance on Meet the Press, by former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O. Carly Fiorina, who had been, in Sulzberger’s words, “rampaging” against The Times. Fiorina had complained that there was “not a single word” in the newspaper’s announcement of Abramson’s departure “about her contributions, about her record, about her time at theNew York Times.” Sulzberger’s eyes widened in frustration. “She should read paragraph four,” he said, referring to his faint praise in that passage thanking Abramson for “not just preserving and extending the excellence of our news report . . . but also for inspiring her colleagues to adjust their approach to how we deliver the news.”

“We originally drafted the whole thing to be very amicable,” Sulzberger continued, explaining how the statement came to be. But in the end, “Jill said no.” The New York Times is an institution whose employees are adept at, perhaps addicted to, in-house Kremlinology. Among Times insiders, one interpretation of the statement that resulted is simply that Abramson is a truth-teller and didn’t want to dress up a bad situation with pretty words. Another interpretation is that her refusal was meant to light a fuse as she retreated from the newspaper. There are likely other interpretations. Sulzberger, though, was insistent: “It wasn’t as though we went out to hurt her. We didn’t. . . . It was my hope for Jill that we could make this go away as peacefully as possible.”

In Sulzberger’s telling, what finally forced him to speak out publicly was not Abramson’s unwillingness to say that she had “agreed” to step down but, rather, what started happening just hours after the announcement: a series of stories by theNew Yorker’s Ken Auletta intimating that Abramson was fired, in part, for raising questions after she discovered that her pay and pension benefits were “considerably less” than those of her predecessor, Bill Keller. The narrative exploded online, and Sulzberger, 23 hours after his Wednesday announcement of Abramson’s departure, when he indicated he would have nothing further to say, felt compelled to issue a statement to the newsroom on Thursday decrying the “misinformation” around Abramson’s firing. Auletta followed up that same day with a story citing salary figures for Abramson and Keller, showing Abramson’s to be lower. On Saturday, Sulzberger issued a second statement, this time citing “a factually incorrect storyline” that had developed. Abramson declined to comment about this to me, or to review specific material relating to any of Sulzberger’s comments from this interview.

No full set of hard data on the pay of top Times editors has been made publicly available; spreadsheets and a few accountants could probably settle the matter in relatively short order. (A Times spokeswoman told me that the paper wasn’t going to make public the private compensation of its employees.) But here is Sulzberger’s explanation. In his office, he told me that when the Times Company sold the Boston Globe, in August 2013, two years after Abramson had become executive editor, Abramson and her counterpart on the editorial page, Andrew Rosenthal, joined the executive committee of the company, a move that significantly increased her bonus. As a result, he said, “salary was a decreasing percentage of her overall compensation.” The increase in her bonus helped boost her overall compensation, according to the Times, to a level more than 10 percent higher than Keller’s had been during his last full year as executive editor, in 2010. As noted, it is impossible to fully evaluate this claim, given that the Times will not release specific information, but Sulzberger is firm on the point: “There is no truth to the charge” that Abramson was paid less than her male counterparts.

Sulzberger added that reporting only on salary as an executive’s full compensation would get me “laughed out of the room” in light of the additional bonus and stock components in most executive pay packages. A former Times executive told me, however, that Abramson had raised objections to her compensation when she took the job of executive editor—that is, before the sale of the Globe and before joining the executive committee—and believed at that time that there was a discrepancy when compared with Keller’s salary. It isn’t clear whether Keller’s bonus structure would have given him higher compensation than Abramson had he been executive editor in 2013. Regardless, Abramson hired a lawyer to discuss her compensation differences with the company, an act that Sulzberger said he found “weird,” but nothing more.

In 2011, when Keller was stepping down, Sulzberger faced a choice between selecting Abramson, the paper’s managing editor, who would be the first female top editor of The Times, and Dean Baquet, an assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief at the paper, who would be the first African-American top editor. (Abramson had joined the Times in 1997 from the Wall Street Journal, where she had been an investigative reporter and deputy Washington bureau chief. Baquet had been an investigative reporter at theTimes and the top editor at the Los Angeles Times before rejoining theTimes in 2007.) The choice was far from easy, and it seemed at the time that the decision—one of the most consequential that falls to a publisher—was one Sulzberger didn’t necessarily want to make. When I asked him if he would have made a different decision if he knew then what he knows now, he looked genuinely bereft, and then conceded the point. “Of course I would have done it differently,” he said. That said, much of what Sulzberger knows now he knew then; Abramson had been a manager at theTimes for years.

What happened between 2011 and 2014, as Sulzberger saw and explained it, was that Abramson became slowly alienated from her masthead colleagues. (Masthead editors are the most senior editors under the executive editor.) When I pointed out that other executive editors of theTimes had possessed the very traits that some have attributed to Abramson—that she could be aloof or autocratic—he countered that times had changed. Sure, he said, Abe Rosenthal, who edited theTimes through the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, was famously difficult. Rosenthal could also focus simply on gathering and publishing the news. But an editor today, Sulzberger said, has to have a different set of skills. Today’s editor has to have stellar journalistic skills “as well as managerial skills to be figuring out how to get the data to help us deliver news in a digital age.” During Rosenthal’s reign, “You could make it work. That’s no longer true. The standard has to be different.” There was something slightly haunting about Sulzberger, whose own manner some have found it difficult to connect with, critiquing another person on grounds of personality. Known for years as “Young Arthur,” he fought to be taken seriously. In contrast to his late father, who held the publisher position before him, he is the opposite of reserved. He can be casual and goofy in unexpected circumstances, and though he does it less than he used to, he has had a tendency to make jokes that few others find funny.

Sulzberger admitted that, under Abramson, the newspaper soared journalistically. But he said he began to hear more and more concerns. Some reporters noted that she was often out of the newsroom—unlike Keller, who was an everyday presence. There were complaints that she made decisions without notifying colleagues. “Patterns in the newsroom were becoming more obvious, and colleagues were coming to me,” Sulzberger went on. In January 2014, he said, he delivered a stark performance review, with a “pattern of behaviors clearly outlined to her by me.” He urged Abramson to be a better manager. The Times’s human-resources department helped her find an executive coach. “When you have someone who is talented and doing a good job journalistically, you try to keep them,” he said. But it eventually became clear to him, he said, that the situation had become “very frayed with Dean, and the rest of the masthead.”

“And then,” Sulzberger said, “came the wave.” The reference wasn’t obvious to me at first—he had to explain that “the wave” referred to the events surrounding Abramson’s attempted recruitment of Janine Gibson, the U.S. editor of the Guardian newspaper, who had worked with various Times editors, notably Dean Baquet, on stories about the N.S.A. documents revealed by Edward Snowden. The circumstances and significance of Abramson’s efforts to woo Gibson are in dispute, but to hear Sulzberger tell it, the episode made it clear that “this”—meaning Abramson’s tenure as executive editor—“is no longer sustainable.”

Gibson had gotten to know Abramson when the two met to discuss how to handle documents leaked to the Guardian by Snowden. (The Guardian, under pressure from the British government not to publish stories based on the documents, had shared some of the material with The New York Times.) Baquet was the point person at theTimes on the Snowden stories, and he and Gibson sometimes clashed, according to a former Times executive who knew them both. (Reached for comment, Baquet acknowledged some tension in the partnership between theTimes and the Guardian over the Snowden documents, but said he liked Gibson and thought she was a fine editor. Gibson declined to comment.)

What followed is one of the most puzzling aspects of the whole affair. Several weeks ago, in April, Abramson, impressed by Gibson’s experience in running the Guardian’s U.S. operation, which exists solely online, started recruiting Gibson to come to theTimes with the title of co-managing editor. The evolution of the news business online had become a focus for theTimes and other newsrooms. Abramson herself had spent six months studying the digital news operation at theTimes before taking the helm as executive editor. TheTimes had appointed an innovation committee, including Sulzberger’s son, A.G. Sulzberger, to determine how theTimes could navigate a new landscape of digital news consumption. On Monday, May 5, Gibson came to the Times’s offices to meet with Baquet and Abramson. She also met with Sulzberger and the Times’s C.E.O., Mark Thompson, who had joined the paper in 2012 after having been the director-general of the BBC. Several people saw Gibson at the office, going in and out of meetings with the executives in question. According to a source close to Gibson, all of them were actively recruiting her. Thompson and Sulzberger believed that Abramson was offering the position of co-managing editor to Gibson. It appears that while Baquet outwardly expressed enthusiasm about Gibson, he did not know that she was being recruited for a job equal to his own. Looking back on the effort, Sulzberger recalled, “We said to Jill, ‘You have to bring Dean in on this.’ It was clear Jill needed to bring her leadership team in.” Gibson and Baquet had lunch, and Gibson reportedly revealed to him the title of the job she had been offered: co-managing editor, on equal par with Baquet himself. “When Janine told Dean that she’d been offered the job of co-managing editor, he didn’t have a clue,” Sulzberger said. Baquet reportedly betrayed no irritation during his lunch with Gibson. But two days later, on Wednesday, May 7, he and Sulzberger had dinner. At that dinner, “I learned the severity of his feelings,” Sulzberger said, which I took to mean that Baquet gave Sulzberger an ultimatum of sorts. Baquet himself had earlier been offered a job at Bloomberg News. Now, Sulzberger worried that Baquet might leave. “At that point, we risked losing Dean, and we risked losing more than Dean,” Sulzberger said. “It would have been a flood, and a flood of some of our best digital people.” Sulzberger went into the office the next day and relayed to Abramson that his meeting with Baquet had not gone well. He gave himself 24 hours to make sure he was doing the right thing, he said. Then he offered the executive-editor job to Baquet. On Friday, May 9, he told Abramson it was time to make a change. The announcement was made five days later, on Wednesday, May 14.

Sulzberger told me that a number of people had come to him, saying that, “The one person we cannot lose is Dean Baquet,” that it was Baquet who was holding the newsroom together. The narrative that vilifies Abramson and deifies Baquet seems very neat—conveniently neat. The one aspect that seems clear is that in his own mind—and in his own telling—Sulzberger believed that he had to make a choice between Abramson and Baquet. There was no middle ground. Sulzberger chose Baquet. From the tenor of our conversation—and as he himself came close to saying—it felt as if he wished he had made that choice at the outset, in 2011.

I asked Sulzberger why he had felt a need to act so quickly. He said, “When you are making a decision to do this, you do it. You don’t cut off one arm, and then wait and cut off the other.” Whatever the merits of that argument, or the curiosity of the metaphor, that approach seems different from the way Sulzberger treated Howell Raines, who held onto his job for more than a month after the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal erupted, in 2003.

During the past week, much attention has been focused on Jill Abramson—on her motives, her style, her gender, her accomplishments, her treatment. It is likely that in the coming weeks and months, the greater part of the attention will turn to Sulzberger. On Sunday afternoon, Sulzberger appeared determined to try to change the narrative. He cast doubts on Abramson’s management and seemed forgiving of his own mistakes. “Am I happy we’re in this place?” he asked himself. “No. Did we lead us there? No.” Sulzberger’s use of “we” in that second question initially seemed strange, until I realized it must mean the Times’s executive leadership. If Sulzberger felt any vulnerability in his view of himself as a promoter of racial and gender diversity, he did not betray it. For him, the paramount message was that “This is not a place that penalizes women.”

When I asked him how he believed events would play out from here, he said that he could not speculate: “All I can do is tell the truth.” Although Abramson, as noted, declined to comment for this piece, her daughter Cornelia Griggs’s Instagram feed has offered a direct and public defense of Abramson’s reputation. Griggs has posted photos of her mother boxing, nuzzling a puppy, and undergoing rehabilitation after a serious accident, in which she was struck by a delivery truck. Last week, Griggs posted a supportive text message she had received from a friend, and wrote about her mother, “This story isn’t over, not even close.”

There is a great deal that remains unknown about this episode, and over weeks and months much more of it will become known. The dueling narratives at the episode’s heart will remain what they are. You will hear that Abramson is a great journalist but a problematic manager, and perhaps you may tend to agree. You will hear that sexism played at least some role in how she was seen and judged, and it’s not hard to be persuaded. You will hear that Baquet is a talented, likeable journalist who fragged his boss—and maybe so. You will hear that Sulzberger was justified in his decision but handled it abysmally, and you may accept both parts of that proposition.

On this last point, most people would accept at least one part of it. That the matter was badly handled by the Times’s leadership is the element about which minds will probably never change. Arthur Sulzberger might be wise to study not just the shortened version of Churchill’s exhortation, but the longer one as well. If he got another frame, there’d be room on that side table for the words “good sense.”